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Doctoral Dissertation Research: Behavioral and Computational Investigation of Transitivity in the Acquisition of Non-Basic Syntax

博士论文研究：非基本语法习得中及物性的行为和计算研究

基本信息

批准号：
1827709
负责人：
Jeffrey Lidz
金额：
$ 1.57万
依托单位：
University of Maryland, College Park
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2018
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2018-07-01 至 2020-06-30
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1827709&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Doctoral Dissertation Research Behavioral Computational

项目摘要

Within the first years of life and without explicit instruction, children acquire a linguistic system that allows them to combine sounds in order to express meanings. Studying this process illuminates how a cognitive system as complicated as language can develop in the human mind, and helps clarify the nature of learning in development. Learning in general requires building on prior knowledge: children can't learn arithmetic if they don't know how to count. This project asks how infants build on their prior linguistic knowledge at each stage of their development, using the limited amount of speech they are able to understand, in order to learn more about the structure of their language. By improving our understanding of how infants learn about their language at each stage in development, the project provides an important step toward understanding why and how the quantity and type of speech heard in infancy contribute to differences in children's later vocabulary and language performance, in school and later in life.This research focuses on the acquisition of "non-basic" clauses as a window into the incremental nature of language learning. Sentences like "What did Mary fix?" are potentially misleading for children in the earliest stages of syntax acquisition, who might not recognize that "what" stands for the object of "fix" and might think that this clause is intransitive. This work pursues the hypothesis that children may use knowledge about verb argument structure in order to identify non-basic clause types in their language. The research integrates approaches from different research communities, using behavioral experiments to investigate the developmental trajectory of non-basic clause acquisition, and computational modelling to evaluate whether the proposed mechanisms are feasible for learning from child-directed speech. Through this case study, this research aims to provide a fuller picture of what portion of the input is useful to an individual child at any single point in development, how children perceive that input given their current grammatical knowledge, and what internal mechanisms enable them to generalize beyond that input in inferring the grammar of their language. The project also includes outreach about issues in language development to local families and high school students from under-represented backgrounds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在生命的最初几年，在没有明确指导的情况下，儿童获得了一种语言系统，使他们能够组合声音来表达含义。研究这一过程阐明了像语言一样复杂的认知系统如何在人类思维中发展，并有助于阐明发展中学习的本质。一般来说，学习需要建立在先验知识的基础上：如果孩子不知道如何数数，他们就无法学习算术。该项目询问婴儿如何在其发展的每个阶段利用他们能够理解的有限言语来建立他们先前的语言知识，以便更多地了解他们的语言结构。通过提高我们对婴儿在每个发展阶段如何学习语言的理解，该项目为理解婴儿期听到的言语数量和类型为何以及如何影响儿童在学校和以后生活中的词汇和语言表现的差异提供了重要的一步。这项研究的重点是“非基本”从句的习得，作为了解语言学习渐进性质的窗口。诸如“玛丽修复了什么？”之类的句子对于语法习得最初阶段的儿童来说，可能会产生误导，他们可能不认识到“什么”代表“修复”的宾语，并可能认为该从句是不及物的。这项工作提出的假设是，儿童可能会使用有关动词论证结构的知识来识别其语言中的非基本从句类型。该研究整合了来自不同研究团体的方法，使用行为实验来调查非基本条款习得的发展轨迹，并使用计算模型来评估所提出的机制对于从儿童定向语音中学习是否可行。通过这个案例研究，本研究旨在更全面地了解输入的哪些部分在发展的任何单个点对单个儿童有用，儿童如何根据他们当前的语法知识感知该输入，以及哪些内部机制使他们能够在推断其语言语法时超越该输入进行概括。该项目还包括向当地家庭和来自弱势背景的高中生宣传语言发展问题。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。